> 176: Love is on the other side of the lake
Hi,
Have you seen Blade Runner 2049? It's been coming up this week because of the air quality in the northeast, but it's also just an incredible and surprisingly hopeful movie. I must also point out here that I did the math based on Harrison Ford's casting in the original and Rick Deckard is an Elder Millennial. Rick Deckard also grew up with slap bracelets, Oregon Trail, and Captain Planet. With that said:
"This is the fundamental power of fiction: to take you beyond your own life—beyond this world, even—and take your imagination somewhere entirely new. After the movie is over, you can relate it back to fucking Donald Trump or whatever all you like. But art is under no obligation to imitate life, and shouldn’t. Bruce Wayne shouldn’t be a charmless downer. Willy Wonka doesn't need an origin story. Old Disney cartoons don't need to be remade into dour 'live-action' ATMs. Movies can be fanciful, silly, surreal, and at a complete remove from you and your problems. They should be free to be themselves."
Related to above: How the employee-owned Defector became "the last good website"—one of a few, anyway.
Just buy the printer everyone has; it's fine.
Catharine MacKinnon: "Discrimination against trans people is discrimination on the basis of sex, that is gender, the social meaning of sex. It does not, contrary to anti-trans self-identified feminists, endanger women or feminism."
Also: Susan Sontag on why androgyny is the future.
"My parents are dead; what now?"
This article is a little weirdly infomercial-y to the degree that I wonder if we'll find out someday that this doctor is like sponsored by the Koch brothers. But it's also fascinating that some people thought to be catatonic for years or decades due to schizophrenia are actually suffering from autoimmune disorders that attack their brain—and a few of them have, after targeted treatment, woken up.
The next time you go to the beach, there may be a whale under your feet.
Photos of David Bowie traveling by train across the Soviet Union, 1973.
Where you can see the Great Wave today, and the Great Wave in paper clips.
The sun had just gone out
and I was walking three miles to get home.
I wanted to die.
I couldn't think of words and I had no future
and I was coming down hard on everything.
My walk was terrible.
I didn't seem to have a heart at all
and my whole past seemed filled up.
So I started answering all the questions
regardless of consequence:
Yes I hate dark. No I love light. Yes I won't speak.
No I will write. Yes I will breed. No I won't love.
Yes I will bless. No I won't close. Yes I won't give.
Love is on the other side of the lake.
It is painful because the dark makes you hear
the water more. I accept all that.
And that we are not allowed romance but only its distance.
Having finished with it all, now I am not listening.
I wait for the silence to resume.—New York Address, Linda Gregg
Bye,
Laura